The Palliative Society

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Byung-Chul Han. The Palliative Society

CONTENTS

Guide

Pages

The Palliative Society. Pain Today

Dedication

Algophobia

NOTES

The Compulsion of Happiness

NOTES

Survival

NOTES

The Meaninglessness of Pain

NOTES

The Cunning of Pain

NOTES

Pain as Truth

NOTES

The Poetics of Pain

NOTES

The Dialectic of Pain

NOTES

The Ontology of Pain

NOTES

The Ethics of Pain

NOTES

The Last Man

NOTES

TRANSLATOR’S NOTES

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Отрывок из книги

Byung-Chul Han

Translated by Daniel Steuer

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The palliative society is also the society of the like [Gefällt-mir], increasingly a society characterized by a mania for liking. Everything is smoothed out until it becomes agreeable and well-liked. The like is the signature, even the analgesia, of the present. It dominates not only social media but all areas of culture. Nothing is meant to cause pain. Not just art but life itself should be instagrammable, that is, free of rough edges, of conflicts or contradictions that could cause pain. What has been forgotten is that pain purifies. It has a cathartic effect. The culture of the likeable and the agreeable lacks any opportunities for catharsis. We are thus suffocated by the residues of positivity which accumulate beneath the surface of the culture of likes.

A report on an auction of modern and contemporary art reads: ‘Whether Monet or Koons, whether Modigliani’s popular reclining nudes, Picasso’s female figures, or Rothko’s sublime colour-block paintings – even, at the top end of the market, excessively restored pseudo-Leonardo trophies – apparently all these need to be assignable upon first sight to a (male) artist and to be so likeable as to border on the banal. At least now a female artist has begun to break into this circle: Louise Bourgeois set a new record for a gigantic sculpture – thirty-two million for her work from the nineties, Spider. Even a gigantic spider can apparently be more decorative than threatening.’6 In the works of Ai Weiwei, even morality is presented in such a way as to inspire likes. Morality and likeability enter into a happy symbiosis. Dissidence decays into design. Jeff Koons, by contrast, creates like-worthy art that is morality-free, and ostentatiously decorative. The only adequate response to his artworks, as he himself states, is ‘Wow’.7

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